Out to Lunch

Today I had a fairly light work day again.  A few co-workers and I decided to head for a mid-day lunch.  We went to the DaVinci Restaurant on the banks of the White Nile River.  The restaurant is open air and is under a canopy of old growth mango trees.  We sat with this beautiful vista of the Nile rushing by, the bridge heading out of town, mud huts with a backdrop of mountains off in the distance.

The food was extraordinary.  I don’t believe I could have had a better meal in North America.  I had a vegetable, calamari stir-fry that was amazing!  The prices at this restaurant were very high, but they were still half of what you would pay at a comparable North American restaurant of this caliber.  Plus you could never get a view and atmosphere like that at home!!

On the way out of DaVinci’s I got talking to a local man who does fishing charters on the Nile and would take us out for some Nile perch fishing.  These are not like the perch at home, they are huge with big teeth!!  It looks like it would be a lot of fun and a few of us are going to try to fit this into a day off.

My adventurous coworker and I decided to walk home from DaVinci’s and the other two went with the driver home.  The walk was approximately 20 minutes, through an area where people live in mud huts with grass roofs.  The Government of South Sudan (GOSS) is knocking down many of these tradition settlements around Juba.  They are claiming these settlements are on government land and many of these people are the ones that are hoarding weapons and causing crime.  To me they looked extremely impoverished.  When a person is put into the position of survival for themselves and family they do what they have to.  I know I would!  So instead of helping these settlements of families, the government shows up with no notice and bulldozes these parts of town for new development.  Really sad they are loosing tradition and making people homeless for the sake of development.

As we got closer to our office, we came across a older woman with a stick.  Obviously high on some type of drug and "out to lunch".  I have seen here (in Sudan) and in Uganda what I think is opium that street vendors sell in pods that are dried up.  It is chewed and the person is constantly spitting all over the place.  Most often this is done right out in public.  Back to the old woman with the stick.  She did not want us whites walking through her neighborhood.  We could see that right away, so we crossed the road and kept walking.  She yelled many obscenities in Arabic. We kept walking.  Next thing I know she smacked me in butt with the stick, I turn around a little ticked off and she was already gone!  We had a good laugh about that incident and went back to work.